Love your enemies, exhorts the Bible; those who preach the doctrine, Nietzsche said, are “sweating while they do it”. The San Francisco-based data scientist turned novelist Cecilia Rabess somewhat agrees. Everything’s Fine, her much-hyped debut, is a blistering study of what it means to date your political opposite.
The novel opens on Jess’s first day of work at Goldman Sachs in New York City. There she meets Josh, an analyst who is a previous classmate. Jess is Black and liberal; Josh is white and conservative. At the Ivy League college they went to, they had clashed on everything from affirmative action to Obama (they were in their freshman year when Obama was first elected president). Now, a year after their graduation, Josh is Jess’s mentor and a “rising star” while Jess is struggling to learn the ropes and is despised by their managing director.
As the only woman on the trading floor, Jess is patronised by the men around her, including Josh, who fails to see how race and gender put her at a disadvantage. “But we’re in the same exact place, Jess,” he tells her. “We had the same education. We have the same exact job. What else do you want?” They bicker; they get in each other’s hair. Eventually, they become friends. There’s definite romantic chemistry (lust-filled eye contact, coquettish banter, alcohol-fuelled parties where bodies touch) but Rabess does not force the pair together. When they hook up, it’s a surprise to both, although Josh will later admit to Jess that he had been smitten “maybe since the first time I saw you, in a way”.
Still, love does not broker lasting peace between them. Rabess’s deeper interest, it seems, lies in interrogating whether two people who are fundamentally different can be together at all. Rabess stages heated wars of ideas between the pair to press home their discordant standpoints on a number of hot topics: institutional racism, crony capitalism, wealth inequality, wokeism, diversity, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump. She is more on Jess’s side than Josh’s, to be sure, but sometimes her flippancy ends up trivialising Jess’s situation. “To make up for so many centuries of oppression, Josh buys Jess lunch,” she writes at one point.
Josh is both a bully and someone with abundant good will. From covering Jess’s shift so she can go to a Rihanna concert to inviting her to join his trading desk when he takes up a new job, Josh goes all out to help Jess – and yet he can never quite bring himself to see the world from her perspective. He gaslights her, hectors her and shuts his eyes to how deeply his politics affects her. One regular topic of contention as the 2016 presidential election draws near is Josh’s wilful blindness to Trump’s “racism and xenophobia and misogyny”. Rabess captures the brokenness of their relationship in one powerful scene. Jess discovers a Maga hat in the kitchen of their home. She loses her cool, confronts Josh (“It’s just a hat,” he tells her) and then picks the hat from the floor where she dropped it and flings it at him. Jess observes how he catches the hat, “takes it by the brim and smacks it twice against his thigh, shaking away dust. Such a casual gesture.”
Rabess is at her best when she is shining a light on the subtle mores that exclude Black women from conventions of desirability. “Blondes, brunettes, then redheads. Then everyone else,” a nagging “old voice” in Jess’s head tells her. When she meets Tenley, Josh’s blond ex-girlfriend, her insecurity translates to self-loathing. This is “the kind of girl who will make her feel sweaty and unkempt”.
Some of the novel’s most penetrating insights pertain to the nuances of flirtatious language. “Pretty” can carry injurious racial import if you have previously been called “the prettiest Black girl we’ve ever seen”, Rabess tells us. So can the phrase “girls like you” that Josh casually throws at Jess early in their courtship “as a compliment probably, but it wasn’t”. As Jess puts it: “It only meant that … there were two kinds of girls: girls and girls like her.” Rabess does not always achieve the incisiveness of these moments. Everything’s Fine remains, however, an assured debut that provides an honest look into the fraught terrain of a mixed-race, mixed-politics romance.
• Everything’s Fine by Cecilia Rabess is published by Picador (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
